OUUVHUODODOVEDOXDLODDUdY ori HEJDUK BERLIN: NIGHTVOICELESS REASON SILENT SPEECH ‘Wim van den Bergh “The true poet is one who inspires’ ~ Paul Valéry’ ‘There are musicians who compose on blank pape, in silence and immobility. Their eyes wide open, they create, bby a gaze that stretches into emptiness, a kind of visual silence, a silent gaze that effaces the world in order to silence its noses; they write music? Thus Gaston Bachelard begins his conclusion to Lair et les songes, essa sur imagination du mouvement. "There are also silent poets,’ Bachelard continues a litle further, ‘silencers who start by quieting an overly noisy Universe and all the hubbub caused by its thunderous sound. They also heat what they write at the same time as ‘they are wtiting it in the slow cadence of written language. They do not transcribe poetry; they write it. Let lothers "execute" what they have created there on the blank page. Let others use the megaphone of solemn public “recitals.” As for them, they savor the harmony of the written page on which thought speaks and the ‘word thinks. Reading these evocative lines ~ while contemplating my essay about Hejduk’s work and in particular his Berlin [Night Masque ~| could not esistthe temptation to think of John Hejduk in analogy to Bachelard’s ‘silent poets’ ~asasilent architect. An architect who writes architecture -and also here Writing should be understood as the Idea of original creation?, A silencer who, inthe case of architecture, stats by effacing the overly noisy world of ‘everyday building production and all the media hubbub caused by the ‘protagonists of architecture” Hejduk doesn't produce buildings; he creates, he writes architecture. He is an architect who, on the blank page, ‘Lives’ his architecture the moment he HA it, thus creating "BT pages on which thought «dts and the YB thinks ‘As | already wrote in an other essay about Hejduk regarding his ‘oeuvre Barthes stated about the work of Sade, Fourier and Loyola’ - consider im to be a logothete, a founder of lan- ‘we can ~in analogy to what Roland ‘guage. Hejduk shares with Sade, Fourier and Loyola the same practice of writing®. In his work we can see ‘the samesensual pleasure in classification, the same mania for anatomizing, the same enumerative obsession, the same im age practice, the same erotic, imagisic fashioning ofthe socal system.’ And as Barthes wrote of Sade, Fourier and Loyola, Hejduk’s work isnot easily accesible either, he also makes pleasure, happiness, communication dependent ‘on an unrelenting order of acombinatve, ‘The language Hejduk creates, like the languages that Sade, Fourier and Loyola founded, is obviously not linguls tc, not alanguage of communication. It is @ new language: in Hejduk’ case it sa spatio-temporal language that is traversed by or traverses, he language of architecture, but is open only to what Barthes calls the ‘semiological definition of Text’ And Text for Barthes isan object of pleasure, and the aim is to assimilate the Text as a kind of imaginative fabric. In other words Hejduk i aTextoperator, a Form-ulator, and ike Sade, Fourier and Loyola, the inventor of a way of wi ing. In his work he liberates the spatio-temporal language of architecture from its solid referential powers by isolating it, by revealing it, and most importantly by taking pleasure init. This means that he creates, he writes, architectural Signs by reading Signs as architecture. Which also means that, within the space and language of architecture, Hejduk discovers and brings to life an extra dimension; a poetic dimension, dimension of ‘poles in other words a dimension of original creation, If we project Barthes’ Reading ofthese authors on Hejduk’s ‘oeuvre’ we can see that in thelr activities as logo- thetes, as founders of new languages, Hejduk as well as Sade, Fourier and Loyola have each had recourse to the same operations ‘The fist operation, as Barthes lists it is‘self-iolation,’ The new language must arise from a material vacuum; an anterior space must separate it from the other, common, idle, outmoded language, whose ‘noise’ might hinder it For Hejduk and his work this means that he retreats into such unaccustomed sit, as those of painting, literature, ‘music, film, medicine, theater, geometry, etc, to Form-ulate his architectural language. ‘The second operation Barthes lists i ‘articulation.’ No language can exist without distinct 888, nor can any lan~ ‘guage exist unless these signs are reprised in a combinative, And that is what Hejduk does in his work, he deducts, combines arranges, he endlessly produces rules of assemblage. ‘The third operation is ‘ordering’: not merely to arrange the elementary fai, but to subject the larger sequence 10.a higher order, creating a kind of ritual to become the form of its spatio-temporal planning. In the case of Hejdul’s work itis the higher order ofthe idea, the ‘eidos,” the ‘Form, that the larger sequence is subjected to, ‘And his new discourse is always provided with something to operate it. The otis can find those ‘operators’ ofHejduk’s ‘oeuvre’ in specific titles or inthe invented programs, in the created institutions or its imagined Subjects, {and in his Masques one can imagine it to be the Sif. In this way the Reader himself acts asa kind of simulta Bn of the play, and thus inspires it, but does not regiment it The logothesis however, as Barthes says, does not ~ after these three operations ~satisty itself with the constitu: tion ofa kind of ritual ora style, because then the language founder would be nothing more then the author of system. To embed a new language, to found a new language through and through, a fourth operation is required: ‘theatrcalization’ Not meaning to decorate the depiction to design a setting for representation, but to make the language boundless, to produce ‘Text’ Every logothete has to become a kind of scenographer, or better, a vir- ‘tuoso, one who loses himself inthe framework he Sets up and arranges ‘ad infinitum And that is exactly what Hejduk does in his work. Thus founding a new architectural language through and through, a vertiginous and perplexing language, @~ in its deadly ‘silence’ ~ subversive language that evolves by involving Like Barthes sees the ‘victorious deployment of the significant Text, the terrorist Text’ in the work of Sade, Fourier and Loyola so we can se it in the virtuosity of Hejduk’s implicitly subverting ‘oeuvre’ Since in his case the Intervention of a Text’ in the discipline is also not measured by the so called realty it contains or projects, but rat- herby the ‘virtu’, the violence that enablesit toexceed the laws that a discipline, an ideology, a philosophy esta blish for themselves in order to agree among themselves in a fine surge of historical intelligibility. And this ‘excess for Barthes is called writing; itis an idea of original creation, the virtuosity in ‘producing Text’, the geni sand joy of "Inventing. Oras he would say, ‘the ultimate subversion does not necessarily consist of saying what shocks public opinion, but of inventing a paradoxical discourse. Invention, and not provocation isa revolutions 17 act, and it cannot be accomplished other than by setting up a new language. So Hejduks greatness lies notin provocating or being radical, but in having invented a vast discourse founded on its own perplexing repetitions. In this way an ‘architectural vacuum’ created in who's virtual silence he constantly shows us the bind spots and vanishing points of our discipline. Ever since Hans Tupker brought me into contact with John Hejduk’s work, back in the seventies, have been fol- lowing with increased fascination the development of his highly evocative “oeuvre In that particular period Hejduk’s architectural investigations were entering a new “space: He had just started sounding the depth of the “idea of the city’ by means of his Venetian projects. Previous to these intriguing projects the architecture ofthecity had not been a leading theme in his work. But in the Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought, The Silent Witnesses land The 13 Watchtower of Cannaregio, one could see how his persistent search and carefully planned investiga tions of the basic condition of the idea of architecture, which in fact his whole ‘oeuvre’ represents, reached its ‘ext phase, A phase that might be characterized as his first investigations into the ‘hardware’ ofthe city. A phase In which the architectural pieces in their autonomous expression as nameable types ike house, tower, cemetery, ete. ~ became elements that started to question the architecture ofthe cit. Inn analogous way the autonomous and nameable elements of architecture, in the previous phase of his work, started to question Architecture by becoming architectural pieces themselves like the Wall House, the Element House, etc. Previous tothe socalled Wall House phase, or better previous to Frame 4 as Hejduk himself cals this phase of his work in the Mask of Meduso ln Frame 2 and 3: the Texas and Diamond Houses, one can see that here, t00, Hejduk'’s'ex-plicating architectures generated by isolating the ‘architectural implications of an ele ‘ment’ and developing it a an architecture in itsel. Inthe case of the Texas and Diamond Houses we can see how ‘geometry and abstraction ae regarded to be crucial elements in the idea of architecture, two elements that we can see coming back ina very intriguing way n his most recent works. But let's not proceed too quickly [After the Venetian projects, which questioned the city’s “hardware, the so called ‘Masques’ mark the next fac: ‘nating phase in Hejduk’s work, This phase can in contrast to the Venetian projects, be characterized as his search Into the architecture ofthe city’s ‘software. This isa phase in which the relations between the elements of the city, the relations between the autonomous and nameable ‘objects’ and the ‘subjecs" ~ among each other and within ‘each other ~ are questioned and become an architecture of their own. [At frst sight Hejduk’s Masques ~ beginning with The Berlin Masque ~ appear to carry us back to the naive world of play, the paradoxical, mysterious reality ofthe childlike imagination, in which fear is coupled to fascination and cruelty to innocence. Yet if we accept ths reality as it stands, it leads us into the space of amazement and imagi- nation - the ‘chora’ of poetic thought, the liminal space of the feast and the game. In ther festive and temporal appearance Hejduk’s Masques look a bit ike abandoned fairgrounds, but in reality they are synthesis machines with variable geometries, monuments not in space but in time; rare mixtures of symbolism and spectacle, chal- lenge and simulation, seduction and biography. They are paradoxical, mythical configurations which confront the ‘order of reality -the idea of architecture in general and the architecture of the city in particular —with something absolutely imaginary, with something that i absolutely useless on the level of reality, but which emanates suchenormous implosive energy that it absorbs the total order of reality. Like @ poem, Hejduk’s Masques have a logic of their own. They have neither rational content nor aim, but they display a ‘mysterious sense’ which lends them an intense evocative power Hejduk’s Masques, his ‘theater plays on the architecture of the city - by there name referring to a type of theater play that flourished in siteenth- and seventeenth- ctuoun come quences of images and texts, of Objects and Subjects, thus generating the space of a ‘virtual city’ with itsspecific fw en ‘hardware’ and ‘software. A Masque, however, should not be understood here asa closed set of Objects/Subjects ‘with predetermined and fixed relations re-presenting the city, but should be regarded as being a kind of Open Whole presenting the ‘idea of the city.” fone had to define the Whole, Deleuze writes, ‘it would be defined by Relation. Relation is not a property of objects its always external to its terms. It is also inseparable from the Open, and displays a spiritual or mental existence. Relations do not belong to objects, but to the Whole, on condition that this s not confused witha clo- sed set of objects... The Whole isnot a closed set, but on the contrary that by virtue of which the set is never abso- lutely closed, never completely sheltered, that which keeps it Open somewhere...The Whole is the Open, and relates back to time or even to spirit rather than to content and to space’ And although Hejduk’s Masques at frst present themselves as closed sets of Objecs/Subjects, in essence they are Wholes of relations, Wholes that are kept open somewhere as iby the finest thread which attaches them to an ever changing reality ofthe city, or bet- ‘ter itsidea, the citys existence in the mind. The Masque lke the Whole creates itself, and constantly creates itself In another dimension without parts - like that which carries along the set of one qualitative tate to another, ike the pure ceaseless becoming which passes through these states. It is in this sense that iti spiritual or mental In concept Hejduk’s Masques draw on the idea of play. An idea that, according to the famous historian Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens, not only permeates culture in all its manifestations, but even precedes culture, and Its specific rational is deeply rooted in our spiritual being. Al the great original activities of human society —archi- tecture included ~ are, in his view, suttused with th idea of play. As also isthe case with language, the tool we use ‘to communicate, learn and command: to make distinctions, define, record: in short to name things, and so raise them to the domain ofthe spirit. Infact there isa metaphor behind every expression ofan abstract thing, and in principle every metaphor is a play on words. In creating language, we are playing constantly jumping from the +‘material to the conceptual. And when the play is over, language is retained asa spiritual creation or treasure. It remains in the memory and so can be passed on or repeated at any moment. Playing is accompanied by feelings of excitement and pleasure, or better joy, and by an awareness that its diffe rent than ordinary life, Like the Masque, the play isan end unto itself: itis free, beyond truth and falsehood, good and evil. tis a Spiritual activity, but not a mora function; its not yet virtuous of sinful - and this also defines the ‘essentially choratic character of the ‘space’ of play and of the Masques. Inthe same way Hejduk’s Masques have, In addition to their choratic spatial structure, a temporal structure of their own an extended now. a presence in ‘ecstasy, The time of the Masque isthe time of fascination, a time experienced from within, @ continuous time ‘which unites the eternal and the fina, simultaneously internal and eternal time, For Huizinga play stands apart from all other forms of thought. Because play takes place within specific bounda- ries of time and place itis isolated from ordinary life. It's not 'actuallif, but rather a withdrawal into a temporary sphere of activity with its own purport. As defined by him, play is @ voluntary action or activity enacted within cer- ‘tain boundaries of time and space, following voluntarily accepted, but absolutely binding rules. In other words, play not only introduces order, it is order. It lends a temporary, limited completeness to the incomplete reality of the world and the chaos of lif, And in this way, in is view, we create our expression of being from the idea of play. We have to learn to lose ourselves in the Masques in order to evoke the ‘essential’ and experience the ‘joyful ter- ror’ of their architectural reality. To enjoy the terrific space-time of a Masque, its‘chora’ of becoming and the sub- limity of its ‘voided center, one has to follow Rilke, in that fear can change into joy. ‘Did you not know, then, that jy is, in reality, a terror whose outcome we don’t fear? We go through terror from beginning to end, and that precisely is jy. A terror about which you know more than the beginning, terror in which you have confidence.” 50 to hear the voiceless reason which Hejduk introduces into the discipline of architecture as a form of con- sciousness which is no longer, or not yet, subject to the censorship of reason - we have to surrender to his terrific festive parade of simultaneous Objects and Subjects, and be absorbed by the procession of images and symbols, signs and texts. We have to become part of his labyrinthine choreography whose only goals the feast or the play inset As such Hejduk’s Masques, his ‘theater plays’ on the architecture of the city have constituted their own genre as Open Wholes, and his Objects and Subjects have reached the status ofa troupe’ of ‘terroristc’ characters, that not conly question the idea ofthe city’s architecture, but alo its life’. Berlin Night is now ~ a8 far as | know - Hejduk’sconcluding Masque, his last work using the format’ of the Masque, thus not only folding itself back on to all the previous Masques, but in particular folding back on to the first, the Berlin Masque, and thus together with Victims completing his Berlin trilogy Berlin Night [2] Gaston Bachelard once sad: We understand so quickly that we forget to imagine. So although | don’t know why Hejduk’s last Masque is called Berlin Night, or to what this ttle refers, see:no problem in using it as a kind of keyword to some ofthe speculative thoughts it evokes in my mind, triggered by the multitude of echoes it seems to contain. In this Masque's particular relation to Berlin's Jewish history the ttle Berlin Might seems to echo memories of the famous ‘Kristallnacht.’ In relation to the concept of the Masques in general as an idea of the carnivalesque ~ it seems to me to echo some aspects of Max Beckmann’s‘Fastnacht’ paintings and as a premonition of the pogrom, his ‘Nacht’ paintings of 1914.25. In relation to Hejduk’s personal fascination with the idea of Angels it seems to me also refer to images of Wim Wenders’ flm Der Himmel aber Berlin (which was, I think, even later). And in its title's imagery it contains for me echoes of rusian blue, the deep, dark blue color ofthe sky on a clear frosty Berlin night. But other thoughts also cross my mind. When for instance I read the text of Passage through the Streets of Berlin, my thoughts go to the ancient idea of the ‘mundus.’ founding ritual in which the navel of new city, the ‘mundus,’ was a hole - made in the ground at the place that was imagined to be the ‘center’ of the new city its connection to the underworld and thus to the souls oftheir forefathers which was filed by each of the founder citizens with a handful of earth that they brought from their place of birth, the land of their foreta thers, and which was then covered with a stone or an altar, thus symbolizing ideas of death and rebirth, of iden tity and of one’s actual rootedness in time and not so much in space, This idea ofthe ‘mundus’ in relation to what read in the Passage through the Streets of Berlin also brings to mind the question if there is a relation between the word ‘mundus’ and the word ‘mound’ and by looking up both words in my dictionary and trying to trace their etymology, a fascinating folding of the ritual in to the word “mound! occurs. na way there seems to be no concrete etymological relation ~ since the Latin ‘mundus’ refers to humankind, to world and the creation of a world-order, to heaven and earth, orto universe and cosmos - but if you take the word ‘mound’, which stands for: ‘a pile of earth heaped for protection or concealment,’ you find ‘that originally ‘mound’ meant ‘an enclosing hedge or fence’ and if you trace It further its Indo-European rootseems to be ‘man,’ which refers to the hand —‘manus' in Latin ~ and here in particular to the hand in relation to ‘uarding to the hand that protects, In contemplating al these fragments of distant echoes that Heiduk’ Berlin Night seems to contain the memory of {2 photograph of Rotterdam after the bombardment, or better of its inner city after the clearance of the rubble, ‘also crosses my mind. Its a kind of aerial photograph in which one can see the matrix of Rotterdam’ old street pattern, after the almost complete devastation, with only afew buildings lft like the St Laurens Church and the Town Hall. This pictur, strangely enough, it evakes the thought that the Germans saved a few of the institutions {and public buildings on purposes as reminders, as monuments to thelr destructive power which now will Become: the crystallization points of Rotterdam’ rebirth The city one sees in this photograph seems tobe abandoned, but If you look closer you see small dots, people walking in streets without buildings, and then to your amazement you see that one of the empty plots, between the streets at the back of the Town Hall, is colonized by a flr or a Circus that put up its tents there. Ina strange way it seems that the lfe ofthe city of Rotterdam started again with festival, or afar, s monument ofits awn temporality. A kind of Masque? {A strange combination, an apparently ‘dead city’ and a fair or a circus, this “embodied joy" of our childhood. My ‘mind travels further to a chapter in Air and Dreams called The poetics of wings, to one of Bachelard’s beautifully apt observations about the sky lark, this "bid the color of infinity,’ as being the ‘embodied joy’ ~and doesn lark In English aso stand for carefree adventure or play? | imagine being one of those dots in the photograph, one of those people in the solitude ofthis vast open plain which once was a city, and then, like 2 ray of sunlight in the blue of the morning sky, to hear the song of the first ark starting to fil the deadly slence ofthis “ity space with ‘ew life, And | can imagine it later tobe like in ¢’Annunzio's The Dead City: All the fields are covered with little wild flowers that are dying; and the song of the larks fills the sky! It is marvelous! | never heard such impetuous singing, Thousands of lars, a countless multitude... They flew up from everywhere, darting toward the sky with the speed of arrows; they seemed mad, vanishing without reappearing, as if consumed by their own song or devoured by the sun.’ Then I realize that the sky lark is akind of vrtuallarus, its counterpart atthe other side of ‘the mirror, and that the words in Jules Supervielle’s Le Matin du Monde: “The sky lark died, Not knowing how to fall’ might have the deeper meaning here thatthe Icarus in us, the joy and adventure of our spatial and material imagination, our flight of thoughts, i stil alive." “We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we per-ceive; itis, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them. If there is no change, oF unexpected fusion of images, there is no imagination; there is no imaginative act. If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance ~ an explosion ~ of ‘unusual images, then there ino imagination. There i only perception...” With this statement Gaston Bachelard ‘opened his introduction to Lair etfs songes, essa sur imagination du mouvement. This not only brings me back to the actual quality of Hejduk’s evocative ‘oeuvre’, but also to a particular aspect ofthe Masques, ie. thelr'space’ in relation to the idea of the Masque as an Open Whole. So its ‘multi-dimensional space, that not only incorpora tes Time asthe ‘choratic space of becoming’ - the dimension of the Concept, the How; but which also incorporates ‘the Spirit, as the dimension of the Open Whole, -the dimension of the idea, the What. Itisa specifickind of ‘space’ whieh inthe later Masques ~ Bovisa, Viadvostok, Riga, Lake Baikal, and Berlin Night Is investigated by Hejduk ~so it seems asa kindof pictorial or cinematic space’. In those Masques Helduk not only creates a set of Objects and Subjects, but he also generates ase of ‘tableausIn these tableaus'- one of the definitions of ‘tableau’ says: ‘an interlude during a scene when all the actors onstage freeze in position and then resume action as before’ one can see how he ‘frames’ constellations of Objects, how he brings them together in 2 "spacelike objects in the ‘space’ of a stil life One should keep in mind, however, that the ‘space’ of asl fe is not @ normal space, nota space of reality, but an isolated space from which all rel life seems to be extracted, a ‘space’ that comes to ‘life’ by carefully isolating the essence of ‘life’ from real life. It isthe ‘space’ of spiritual affects, the ‘space’ that includes the spirit of life by carefully excluding real life like it includes the essence of ‘reality it idea, by carefully isolating it from reality. When I think about this aspect in the ‘space’ of Hejduk’s Masques it reminds me of some of the things that Giles Deleuze said about the “space in the films of Car-Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson, We pass from a closed set that is fragmented to an Open spiritual Whole that i created or recreated. Or take for example Dreyer, where the Possible has opened up space asa dimension of the spirit (fourth or fifth dimension). Space isno longer determi- ed, it has become the any:space-whatever which is identical to the power of the spirit, tothe perpetually rene- wed spiritual decision: itis this decision which constitutes the affect, or the “auto-affection”, and which takes ‘upon itself the linking of parts “Space is ne longer a particular determined space, it has become any space- whatever, (espace quelconque) to use Pascal Auge’ term... Any-space-whatever Is not an universal abstract, in all times, in all places. tis perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that i, the principle of itsmetric relations or the connection of its own parts so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of, ‘ways. It isa space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the insta- bility the heterogeneity, the absence of links of such a space, Ia richness in potentials as singularities which are, asit were, prior conditions of all actualization, all determination." Like Dreyer explored horizontals and verticals, symmetries, high and low, in his lm frames, so does Hejduk in the ‘pace’ of his ‘stl lifes’, the “tableaus’ of his Masques. Among the thirty tableaus/frames of the Berlin Night Masque published in this book, we also find Dreyer lke cutting frames, Objects cut off by the edge of the frame, and also frames exploring diagonals and counter-diagonals, pyramidal or triangular figures. All this framing’ also determines what Deleuze calls an ‘out-of field, (hors-champ'), ‘that refers to what is neither seen nor under: stood, buts nevertheless perfectly present. This out-of el, this excluded reality, fulfills the function of “intro: ducing the transspatial and the spiritual into the isolated system which can never be perfectly closed.” And like Delouze says of Dreyer so also Hejduk turned this framing ofthe essence, or better this isolating ofthe idea, ‘into fan ascetic method: the more the image is spatially closed, even reduced to two dimensions, the greater Is its capacity to Open itself on to a fourth dimension which is time, and on toa fifth which i Spirit. In the course of time it seems to me that it is especially Hejduk’s ‘oeuvre’ that has become denser and denser; not surrendering itself to exploitation as most of his contemporaries’ work has done, thus becoming thinner and thinner, Hejduk, a8 one can see from his vast and always fascinating work, i an architect of the ‘long breath’. a stayer not a sprinter, not a shooting star that looses its eneray quickly by burning up its matter, but more a ‘red siant’ who's matter in the end implodes to become a black hole gathering all the energy it once emitted, Not only as an architect in relation to his discipline, but also asa teacher in relation to his students, he creates 9 kind of ‘architectural vacuum’ that one can only fill with the ar of one’s breath, one’ ‘anima’, one's own Soul. A ‘vacuum’ who's absolute silence one can only fil wth one's own ‘architectural words’ inaudible words as long as there isnot enough air of one’s breath to catty them. So maybe the most important lesson that Hejduk ‘teaches Us in his work, his “living” work, the “ceuvre" that he lives, is exactly that; that every cultural phenomenon, every human occupation only ‘lives’ as long as this occupation is fed from within with the ‘energy’ that inspires’ it and is practiced by people that love their profession. it is the loveless professionalism, the production of ‘lifeless, Lninspired works, that Hejduk opposes in his work and in his teaching, o better by his life's work. The same loveless professionalism that Louls Kahn once criticized by stating that ‘f you are in the profession of architecture, it Is lkely that you are not an architect. f you are an architect without thinking of the profession you might be ‘one, thus depriving most of the so-called architects of their professional identity. ‘Actually Hejduk’s thoughts have a lot in common with those apparently simple, but in fact very dense contem: plations of Kahn at the height of his career. One only has to compare Hejduk’s introduction and statement for this, book with Kahn's following words: ‘In us inspiration to learn. Inspiration to question. Inspiration to lve Inspiration to express. These bring to man their institutions. The architect i the maker of their spaces. The inst: ‘tutions are the houses of the inspirations. The architect considers the inspiration before he can accept the dicta: 10s ofa space desired. He asks himself what isthe nature of one that distinguishes itself from another. When he senses the difference, he isin touch with it's Form. Form inspires design. | think of Form as the realization of a nature, made up of inseparable elements. Form has no presence, Its existence is in the mind, if one of its elements were removed its Form would have to change. Form precedes Design, It guides its direction for it holds the rela {tion of its elements. Form is what, Design is how. Design gives the elements their shape, taking them from their ‘existence in the mind to their tangible presence. In composing | feel that the elements of the Form are always intact, although they may be constantly undergoing the tals of design in giving each its most sympathetic shape, ach composer interprets Form singularly. Form, when realized, does nat belong to its realizer. The most impor tant thing to teach however i to know that there isn such thing as architecture. There isthe sprit of architec ‘ure, but it has no presence. Architecture exists in the mind. What does have presence is a work of architecture Architecture has no favorites, it has no preferences in design it has no preferences for materials it has no prefe rences for technology, styles or methods, it just sits there waiting for a work to indicate again, to revive the spirit of architecture by its nature.” Comparing Hejduk’s words in this book with the above of Kahn one senses how both are circling around the same ‘voided center, the same ‘black hole’ inthe discipline of architecture; that sits Spirit’ or literally “breath, nother words architecture's ‘breath of life’ its ‘anima’ or ‘animus’ ~ its Soul, And also the condition ofthe archi: ‘tects mind that ‘pro-duces,’ that ‘leads-to" is Idea ~ its “eldos’, ts Form, Paraphrasing the foreword to Air and reams one could say: what Hejduk and Kahn teach is that spirit isthe heart of architecture and that architectu res the ensoulment of spirit. For them the objective world of architecture is more than an inert scientific sphere. Its alive’ and responsive. It challenges the human being to participate. Through interaction with the world we‘not only learn about our souls desires, but also that architecture can mirror some of our spiritual aspirations by ‘engaging our imagination, seizing on images of ‘architecture,’ exploiting them to express innermost being. Not simply representations or reproductions of architecture, these ‘architectural’ images are the reality we single out {rom all the multiple possibilities of animation surrounding us. In the end tis characteristic for Hejduk and his work that he, even in comparison to the poetics of Kahn, dares to {90 further and to take an even vulnerable postion in the architectural debate of his time. As he also proves in the Architects Statement for this book, in not using some of the generally accepted or fashionable phrases ofthe dis ipline’s debate, but by employing the metaphorical and poetical qualities of the idea of breathing to express what for him thought means as an architect. Oras Bachelard opens his chapter called Silent Speech: nits simp: le, natural, primitive form, far from any aesthetic ambition or any metaphysics, poetry is an exhalation of joy, the ‘outward expression ofthe joy of breathing. "*